The eyewitnessed reportage has a pronounced character of narrating. The imaginative power of the text helps the reader to empathise with the characters. That makes constructing empathy a necessary skill of reporters. But how can this be done?

Despite a tradition of story telling among reporters, narratologists virtually have neglected the reportage genre. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how narrative strategies can be used in reportages and, at the same time, suggest methods for investigating those strategies. The main question is: How can empathy be constructed? Empathy is here defined as a function of presence,perspective, selection and disnarration. A screen of covert values is also added.

Even though a reportage is about real events, it always represents a personal interpretation. It presents the readers with a represented reality. In a narratological model for the macro level of the reportage I identify the trait of construction as an interaction between three instances: the producer (i. e. the implied author), the narrator and the experiencing reporter. On a micro level this model helps me to explain, for example, how a homodiegetic narrator can be combined with external focalisation, and how another character than the experiencing reporter can be focalised. In the former case I examine the interplay between showing and telling relative to the narrator’s visibility. In the latter case I especially focus on a complex technique for shifting perspectives, both those concerning thoughts, like Free, Indirect Discourse (FID), and those concerning perception. At the same time I study different degrees of perspectivity.

The purpose of this doctoral thesis is to analyze discourses of children, morality and gender in prose works for children and adults written between 1880 and 1910. Ten texts by Amanda Kerfstedt, Helena Nyblom and Mathilda Malling are studied. The main questions are: To what extent did writing for children or adults create different possibilities and restraints for the authors? Were ideas of morality and sexuality articulated differently in relation to children, women and men? What gender ideals were formulated through depictions of children’s upbringing?

By foregrounding the role of children and children’s literature, a new perspective on the period is put forward. The analyses explore how changing ideas about family, femininity and virtue affected the way women wrote and how the literary establishment received their works. Some other important topics are the debate on children’s sex education in the 1880’s, the function of childhood in discourses of gender and sexuality, and the role of confession in 19th century society and literature.

Conceptions of children, gender and morality are continuously redefined in Kerfstedt’s, Nyblom’s and Malling’s texts for children and adults. Varying ideals, ideas and practices are compared in the texts, which creates a space for change and negotiation. In contrast to previous research, this thesis shows that Swedish children’s and adult literature around the turn of the 20th century shared many themes and ideas. Although different aspects of the questions are put in focus, books for both audiences explore how a true man, woman or child should be, what defined a moral life and, ultimately, what it meant to be human.

7.

Andersson, Maria

Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Literature and History of Ideas.

Sweden in the Hands of Robbers. The Narrative of the Nation in Sven Wernström’s Den underbara resan. Sven Wernström’s Den underbara resan (‘‘The Wonderful Journey’’) describes a modern Sweden by following in the trail of Selma Lagerlöf’s classic The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. This article analyzes Wernström’s depiction of Sweden and its people. By incorporating The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, the author foregrounds the notion of nation as narrative by stressing the subjectivity of the text and processes of creation. Rather than subscribing to Lageröf’s vision of unity, Wernström describes a Sweden divided by class conflict. Being a true Swede is defined through economic disinterestedness and love of nature. Den underbara resan describes the creation of a model citizen through the bildung of the protagonist. However, the ideal citizen is not depicted as a loyal subject but as an independent person willing to critize people in power and protest against injustice

21.

Andersson, Maria

Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Literature and History of Ideas.

Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Literature and History of Ideas.

Druker, ElinaStockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Literature and History of Ideas.Hallberg, KristinStockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Literature and History of Ideas.

The main aim of the dissertation is to examine the importance of the moment in relation to human experience and to the narrative in the writings of Stig Dagerman (1923-1954), primarily the novels Ormen (The Snake, 1945), De dömdas ö (The Island of the Doomed, 1946), Bränt barn (A Burnt Child, 1948), Bröllopsbesvär (Wedding Worries, 1949), the short stories "Den hängdes träd" (The Hanging Tree, 1945) and "De röda vagnarna" (The Red Wagons, 1946). The dissertation shows the moment as being of crucial importance by serving as the point of time for the fictional character’s critical experience. The moment also functions as a structuring principle for the narrative. In this, the discussion is supported by the theories on the chronotope found in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.

With the ideas of Michael Riffaterre as the principal theoretical basis in the study, the reading of the texts focuses on a matrix common to the works discussed. The reading goes from a description of the primarily profane subject matter of the narrative to an understanding of the religious discourse in the works. This interpretation receives additional support in the theories on religious and mystical experiences found in Rudolf Otto.

Finally, the dissertation focuses on man’s sensitivity to, and longing for, a transcendental entity or a God in the broadest sense – a longing which manifests itself in different ways in these texts and is set against the human predicament of being. Man’s desperate religious longing for a transcendental entity or a God are ultimately understood as the significance or principle of unity in the texts under discussion.

The paper is based on a number of theories, elaborated within the interdisciplinary field of study ”law and literature”, and interprets Thorsten Jonsson’s short story collection Fly till vatten och morgon [Flee to water and morning (1941)] in terms of equity. The paper demonstrates that Jonsson’s method of arranging his criminal material – mostly real criminal cases, reported in newspaper articles and investigation records – to a large extent corresponds to the principle of equity: the short stories take up an hermeneutic attitude toward the presented criminal cases, correct official legal representation of the crimes by refering to the inner life of the criminals, supplement the individualized and psychologized portraits of criminals by traits borrowed from the image of the paradigmatic criminal and relating them to general human weaknesses, use these complex reflexions on criminality to criticizying the judicial and penal apparatus etc. Special attention is given to power structures established by the collection’s equity project. It is argued that the interpretative practices of the short stories rest on the binary, theological-utilitarian notion of nature which implies repressive marginalizations and, among others, results in the criminalization of homosexual behavior. But paradoxically, the collection’s equity hermeneutics revolts againts its own hegemonic regulations and produces a number of counterhegemonic semantic displacements. Particularly subersive are the short stories’ narrative structures which one the one hand are a product of the collection’s binarities, but on the other hand load these equity norms with a connotative ironic ambiguity.